Emotions in the Moral Life

Robert C. Roberts extends to the moral life the account of emotions presented in his Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (2003), that they are "concern-based construals." In this book the author explains how emotions can be a basis for moral judgments, how they account for the deeper moral identity of actions we perform, how they are constitutive of morally valenced personal relationships like friendship, enmity, collegiality and parenthood, and how both pleasant and unpleasant emotions interact with our personal wellbeing (eudaimonia). He argues that none of these dimensions of emotions' values is reducible to any of the others. He continues by sketching how all of these moral dimensions contribute to emotions' participation, in diverse ways, in our virtues and vices.